There is always some contention raised at Top Ten Towers about whether or not one should receive / start eating Easter Eggs on Good Friday... or wait until Sunday. Personally, I'm well past Easter Eggs - I'd rather have some nice nuts. But some people hate waiting till Sunday for their eggs. What does the hivemind think?
If it's just an average Friday today, or you're having to wait till Sunday for your Easter Eggs, you may be interested to learn that Friday April 3rd 2026 is also...
Don't Go To Work Unless It's Fun Day
"This light-hearted occasion encourages individuals to pause and assess how they actually feel about their work, not just how they think they’re supposed to feel. If the day’s agenda looks like nothing but stress, monotony, or one meeting too many, the message is simple: rethink the plan."
OK, are you going to pay my mortgage while I take time to rethink the plan?
There's a line in there which goes "You can burn it down as far as I’m concerned", which always reminds me of whenever we had a fire drill in my previous job... all those teachers (and students) stood out in the car park, praying it wasn't just a practice.
Walk to Work Day
Is it just me, or will a lot of people not be going to work today because it's a Bank Holiday? I don't think either of these days have been planned very well this year, have they?
But possibly my favourite pointless suggestion for today is this one...
National Find A Rainbow Day
And I quote...
"Quite a few ways to celebrate Find a Rainbow Day can be imagined. It might be fun to grab some friends and try to find a rainbow, although this activity may be dependent on the weather."
D'oh!
Don't despair though, because there's one occasion I can absolutely get behind celebrating today...
World Party Day
"World Party Day is based on the idea that peace is not the opposite of war, merely its absence. The real opposite of war is party, and World Party Day aims to synchronise a massive, world-wide party to celebrate everything that’s good and optimistic!"
I'm not really sure I believe that the real opposite of war is party - for two reasons. Firstly, I've been to quite a few parties that ended up as wars. And secondly, I'd rather stay home and read a book.
However, this day wins because it allows us the opportunity to celebrate the work of the late, great Karl Wallinger...
Another conversation starter from Richard Herring's book Emergency Questions...
Which conspiracy theory do you think might actually be true?
Rich thinks Paul McCartney really was replaced by a lookalike in the late 60s. You may well agree with him, but I'd argue that the replacement was far more interesting in that case.
These days, conspiracy theories get rather a bad rep. I blame the internet and all the right-wing loonies who have ruined the good old conspiracy theory for everyone. I used to love a good conspiracy theory... nowadays, I'm more likely to keep that to myself in case people think I'm a Trump supporter.
But if I had to choose a conspiracy theory that I still feels needs further investigation... despite all the (redacted) files that have been released in the intervening years, I would go for the JFK assassination every time.
Look, I know the Oliver Stone movie was a bit dubious in places, but there were still far more questions than answers. Do I really believe Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman? What about the shots from the grassy knoll? Why did Jack Ruby kill him before he could be properly interrogated?
Come on... the guy was a Patsy! Even the Manic Street Preachers think so...
What about you? Were the moon landings faked by Stanley Kubrick? What about the Roswell Incident? Was there something in David Icke's Lizard People rantings? Is the Illuminati controlling our every move? Go on, we're all friends here...
I’m thinking back to when I worked in radio. When I moved
into the advertising department, there was a guy already working in there who
everybody liked. We’ll call him Kevin, because… no, I did that joke last week,
didn’t I? He wasn’t called Kevin. But Kevin was the exact opposite of Bob, the
guy everybody agrees is a dick. Kevin was wonderful.
He was so witty and charming and talented and kind… seriously, you’d love him.
The problem was, I didn’t take to Kevin at all. I just
didn’t get what everybody else saw in him. I mean, he wasn’t a Bob-level dick,
but out of everyone in the office, I found him by far the hardest to warm to,
and definitely the least welcoming. He seemed a bit stand-offish, and I
clearly got the impression he thought that he was better than me and that I
didn’t deserve to be working in the same department as him. This was never
overt, and you could well just put it down to my infamous paranoia, but I don’t
think it was purely in my imagination.
Putting aside the (possibly paranoid) idea that Kevin
treated me differently to everyone else he met, why else might I not like
someone everyone else thought was great?
To try to answer this, I waded once more, neck-deep, into
the sewers of the interweb, and the first link to come floating past was this
one from Headspace: What happens
in the brain when we dislike somebody?
Guess where the finger of blame gets pointed almost
immediately?
Yep, it’s our old friend the amygdala. When we decide we don’t
like some, “’there
is preferential activation of the amygdala’,” which means the brain region
associated with fear and aggression flares up. This visceral, emotional
reaction can spark a long-term pattern of dislike when it’s validated by
action: if you perceive that someone has hurt you, your fear of them becomes
rational.”
Essentially, we’re back to the storytelling brain creating
neural pathways in reaction to negative stimuli – it’s why I learned to hate
New Order all over again. But this isn’t really answering my central question –
why I dislike Kevin, when everyone else thinks he’s Superman.
When you instantly dislike someone, you’ve made a snap
decision that they’re threatening based on minimal information.
Ah ha – tell me more!
And they do… with six different
suggestions as to why I disliked Kevin…
1. He’s different.
Humans are wired to like and bond with their own tribe.
This one is the basis for all forms of prejudice, especially
racism. It’s about instinctively not liking anything that looks or appears different to
you. Many of us are able to overcome this in-built reaction because we teach
ourselves (or someone older and wiser has taught us) that it’s bullshit.
Of course, using your conscious mind, you can overcome
this bias. This is why education is so valuable.
That’s what I was trying to say.
Anyway, I can’t really
apply this to Kevin. He wasn’t particularly different from me – we had the same
skin colour, hair colour, similar height and weight… he wasn’t even a particularly
good-looking dude for me to feel inferior to. And he liked or was interested in
many of the same things as me. We were definitely from the same tribe, so there
was no reason to take against him on the surface.
When you get that bad ‘vibe’ from someone without knowing
why, it could be that they reminded you of a previous negative experience.
Again, I’m not sure I can make this fit. I’d encountered a
lot of unpleasant people by this point in my life, but Kevin didn’t really
remind me of any of them. Apart from people I’d met previously who everyone
else seemed to like… hmm. Could that be a clue?
This one’s more about suppressed memories of someone you’ve
met before. Like, say, you meet the school bully twenty years later in a
completely new context and you don’t even recognise him, but your subconscious
mind does, and it’s this which sets your amygdala screaming.
Which is fair enough, but I’d never met Kevin prior to starting
in the department. I’d seen him round the building, but that was about it.
Except…
when I had seen him around, I guess I’d seen him talking and laughing and
getting on with other people… yet he’d never made any attempt to talk to me.
Could it be that he’d taken an instant dislike to me? Did I remind him of
something threatening? Was the problem with Kevin’s brain, not mine? I guess
I’ll never know the answer to that one…
OK, so, this is where it becomes murky. Because I was going
to work in the advertising department with literally no previous experience. I
had recently passed my English degree and was writing on a regular basis – I
could easily evidence creativity, which is what got me the job… but I was new
to the concept of using creativity to sell things. Kevin, on the other hand,
was seen as the star writer in the department. He’d won awards!
Jealousy is often a big reason for disliking someone for
no apparent reason. Jealousy results from upward social comparison. You see
someone who’s better than you or has what you want, and you feel jealous.
That stings. That really stings. But I have to accept it as
a possibility for why I didn’t like Kevin. Although it doesn’t really explain
why he didn’t like me. Unless that was all in my imagination.
Or… prior to going for that job in advertising, I had made a
(small) name for myself in the station on air. (This was prior to the
arrival of my nemesis, the programme controller I referred to as “Tim Allen”
during my
long-running series about my days in commercial radio.) The show I
co-presented featured quite a lot of creative content – comedy sketches and
characters that went down well with the listeners, though I’m sure I’d cringe
myself to death if I heard any of them again today. Anyway, I’d been on air doing
all this “funny” stuff for a few years prior to my move into commercial
production… and chances are Kevin had heard some of that. Maybe he’d formed an
impression of me from that (“he’s just not funny”) or maybe – longshot, I know,
but we need to cover all bases in answering this question – maybe he was a teensy bit jealous of me. Yeah, he’d been winning the awards,
but only for writing ads. He hadn’t been doing the funny stuff just for funny’s
sake. Maybe he was angry I’d had that opportunity and he (being clearly much
more talented) hadn’t. Anything’s possible.
People tend to hide their flaws and ignore the qualities
they need to develop. So, when they come across someone having the same flaws
as them or having the qualities they want, they hide again.
For example:
You lack confidence, and confident people put you off.
Nail, thy head is hitteth, you might well be thinking.
And it’s perfectly feasible that this is the answer: Kevin
was a confident guy and I hated his confidence. Although it’s equally possible
that he was just as insecure as I was, but much better at hiding it and coming
across as confident. Which would link back to my longshot from #4… but this is
all supposition, there’s no science to it at all.
When we meet people, we’re constantly making snap
judgments about them. If they display welcoming and open body language, we feel
good. If they show closed body language, we feel off.
Clearly, this is the case with Kevin – he actively went out
of his way to get on with everybody else in the office, but stayed cool around
me. And that’s still the case to this day when I bump into him in the book of
faces. One of my (friendly) old colleagues will post a photo or a memory from
our past and various people will leave a nostalgic comment… and there’s me and
Kevin in the same (virtual) room all over again, talking to everybody else but
ignoring each other.
We’re quick to put people in the ‘friend’ or ‘foe’
category because, again, the mind doesn’t want to take any chances. It makes
these critical decisions based on minimal information gleaned from body
language, facial expressions, and voice tone.
The ironic thing is, Kevin left soon after I joined the department (was it me?) and went on to a successful career writing for TV comedy shows. Despite many attempts to follow in his footsteps, that never happened for me. Maybe that’s because he was more talented than me… or maybe it’s because he was more confident. It doesn’t really matter in the end: he won. And here I am, thirty years later, still fretting over this, while I doubt he's given me a second thought...
On the first day of the summer holidays, Sam and one of his school friends were building a den in some bushes next to the local playing field while their two dads chatted in the sunshine. Suddenly the boys ran screaming from the bushes, chased by wasps. Both were stung repeatedly. For the rest of the summer, Sam has gone full Tasmanian Devil at the first sign of a wasp... which has been something of a pain while on holiday, because there are more wasps than ever this year. "Britain" is "under attack from 'drunk' German wasps that 'go nuts' and sting for no reason," says The Daily Star, so it must be true. Always nice for a national newspaper to find a way to stir up racist sentiment even in a story about wasps. Stan Boardman would be proud.
Wherever they came from, there's no doubt that the wasps are in abundance right now, and they're out for blood. I was stung myself last week while visiting a nature reserve. First wasp sting in 45 years: on holiday as a young boy, I picked up a fallen apple from in an orchard and took a bite... only to find a wasp hiding inside...
Wasps often get bad press, though scientists argue they bring important ecological benefits. But frankly, I've grown bloody sick of being surrounded by them whenever I open my sandwiches this summer. Buzz, quite literally, off!
The more I thought about this particular sin, the more I realised it was an impossible task: I reckon at least 50% of all pop songs ever written deal with envy of one kind or another. Here, then, are some of the most blatant...
Three cheers for obscure 90s indie! Three cheers for the youtube commenter who claims "the lead singer of this band is an English teacher at my school now".
Yes, I did include this on my Top Ten Sexual Songs, but it's far too good not to feature here too. Just wait for my Top Ten History Songs!
I'm jealous of the man the man you broke the heart of Broke the heart of I'm jealous of the men you knew before In a life that I can never be a part of There's more than meets the eye In the way a stranger meets your eye, I know there's more A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy, Parts 17-24
Given my aversion to all things Beatlacular, you might have expected me to go for the Roxy Music version. But I watched that on youtube and Bryan Ferry's 80's leer scared the bejeebus out of me, so I think I'll stick with the original.
It's sad that they're going for a PG-friendly take on the Freddie Mercury biopic, and that in choosing to do so they've discouraged Sacha Baron-Cohen from taking part.
Still, we'll always have the real Freddie, whenever we listen to songs like this.
So I'm thinking "who's most likely to have written a song about jealousy... even if they haven't given an obvious nod in the song's title?" Before I even remembered this song, I thought: Justin Currie.
And just like a man he holds you gently
And just like a man he strokes your hair
And just like a man I still pretend that I'm
Immune to the whole affair...
Poor Neil: he looks so glum. Somebody give him a hug!
Where've you been?
Who've you seen?
You didn't phone when you said you would!
Do you lie?
Do you try
To keep in touch? You know you could
I've tried to see your point of view
But could not hear or see
For jealousy
I almost put this in my Top Ten Greed Songs too, but having watched the video, I realised it's more about jealousy. It's a simple enough tale in which Meat falls in love with a girl, only to catch her making love to his best friend. Only, in classic Jim Steinman style, that's not quite enough. Before Meat knows what's happening, the object of his affection is getting off with not one of his best friends... but two... and, eventually, a whole group of them! Basically, she'll shag everyone he knows (all at once, by the sound of it): the only one she won't touch with a barge pole is poor old Meat himself. Being the nice guy he is though, Meat is prepared to step aside and watch this happen... through gritted teeth...
Won't you take some more? It's what you came for And don't mind me I won't throw you no curve Have yourself a ball with my good woman Won't you take some more, boys? It's more than you deserve...
(The bit where Meat bellows, "Listen here, group!" makes me howl with laughter while my heart simultaneously breaks into a million pieces every time I hear it.)
I was frankly horrified to discover I'd lived 41 years of my life ignorant to the fact that this song had a video. Perhaps the greatest video ever recorded in the history of videos. The Citizen Kane of music videos. There are times in my life when I think I could happily survive on a desert island with nothing but the complete Jim Steinman / Meat Loaf collaborations to sustain me. Having finally seen this video, I think I could even make do with just a ratty old VHS of this promo and nothing else. It's more than I deserve...
Also: Jack Black stole his entire act from Meat Loaf. Fact.
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